The U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt returned to port last week after hosting the Northrop Grumman X-47B unmanned combat air vehicle for more at-sea trials. The goal was to test the aircraft’s interaction with the ship in off-nominal wind conditions. Nominal conditions are winds up to 25 knots right down the runway on deck. Testers were looking for 35 knots of relative winds and crosswinds up to 7 knots.

Here are a few statistics from the tests:

26 total deck touchdowns

21 of those were touch and gos

five catapult launchs and five trap landings

five wave offs (two planned and three owing to software logic the automatically conducted a wave off owing to extreme wind conditions).

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Online Editor I've been around airplanes since I was a kid. That's when my uncle, a professional pilot, showed me how to fly his Cessna 177 Cardinal. l later became a writer and editor, so covering the exciting and ever-changing aviation industry -- which I've been doing in Flight Journal's Flybys since the late '90s -- was a natural fit.